Cook Wannabee

Welcome back!

I do enjoy food. Sometimes, I even enjoy the making of it. Most of the time, if it ready to eat, I am happy,

Have you realized that there are lot of other uses for food other than just eating it? I have heard of egg shampoos, milk shampoos, beer shampoos for starters. You can use vinegar (which counts as a food item) and newspapers to make windows clean and sparkle, they will also not fog up as easily as before. Vinegar can help clean up the interiors of coffee percolators and remove any calcium build up. You can use peanut butter to help remove gum from fabric surfaces. You can use mayo to help make you hair shiny and have more body.

Salt can be used for more than preserving food, it can be used to help clean glass coffee pots. Many waitresses in restaurants have learned this by having to do it with salt and ice. Salt can also be used to preserve snake skins so they can be used. My husband has done this many times. He also uses Neets Foot Oil afterwards to make the skin soft and pliable.

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Had a dream last night. Went to a reunion that involved everyone staying at the school for a couple of days. Don’t remember what type of school, just school. In my dream I drove a pale yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

According to the dream, we all lived at the school while attending it. In the dream I had to clean out my bedroom, before everyone sat to eat. This one apartment my friend lived in had a lot of hidden cabinets, and two kitchens. One rally big kitchen, and one small and tidy kitchen. In the big kitchen, not only were there lots of cabinets, both above and below; but, there was also WILBUR.

One area of the big kitchen was an outward pointing corner of cabinets that went from the ceiling to the floor. There were a lot of little knobs all over it, that were painted a light blue. My friend used the small kitchen mostly because if you bumped that one corner cabinet with knobs, WILBUR would come rolling out and unfold. WILBUR was a huge folding table that was 8′x4′ and big. Once WILBUR ws out, it was very tiresome to fold it back in and it would keep trying to come back out and unfold. Most of my dream was spent trying to get the table back into its storage cabinet, and helping the new tenants refold WILBUR over and over agin. We finally had to tie many of the knobs together to keep it contained. When I finally gathered up the things that I dropped, because of WILBUR, I went out to find my car.

That car was parked in one corner of the parking lot and it was filled with all types of yellow cars, trucks, vans, etc. I wanted my car! I wanted my VW ! I wanted to leave.

Boy, was I glad to wake up and finally feel like I was going to get some rest.

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Yup, I did spell out Crisco fight. You have heard of water balloon fights, squirt guns, water hose fights. These are things that can be fun and get a lot of laughter involved. Well, one day a few years ago our family (before I got married) got into a fun mood. We lived in Florida and sometimes we got into water fights. Well, we ended up with Crisco one day. All four of us were smeared all over with generous gobs of Crisco.

When we were finally able to get it all cleaned up, our hair had new shine to it! Of course it was not easy to clean up, but I remember all of the laughter that happened. Our sides were sore the next day because we had laughed so hard. Families can be fun. Laughter can be one of the most glorious parts of family fun.

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Who is it that truly designs kitchens for apartments? Has that person ever had to actually use one that they have designed? Sometimes I do wonder about that myself.

It is the same thing with the public bath rooms that can be found in many places. The way things are arranged can truly be a pain in the back or other places. I have actually heard very slender people complain about how things are arranged. That means that the normal or over-weight person wouldn’t have a chance would they?

Any way, back to the kitchen again. Where we live now the kitchen isn’t so bad, except for the need for more shelf space. I have it easy. My mother-in-law (yes, sometimes they can be very helpful) gave me a rather large metal shelf rack that is installed and very well used. It sits right next to the ‘fridge’ and couldn’t be in a better spot. We usually keep it well occupied with the things that sometimes have no regular place to be stored. With Hurricane season coming up, we have a lot of different bottles of water for ‘just in case’. A nice lady that I know used to call that type of water - bomb water. She probably still does call it that. We call it ’storm water’. Having storage in your kitchen is really nice. Just once, though, it would be nice for an actual cook to design the kitchens for apartments. Architects are very handy, but they are not cooks, are they?

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Did you ever want to write something, but had no idea what to say? Well, that happens to me sometimes. Then I wonder what is going on when my thoughts go blank. A piece of cheese right now would help. I know, usually chocolate is what some go for, but I am a cheese lover.

I need to get some sleep, but my mind is active - sort of. My cats are exploring the under sink cabinets, I hear thumps, rattles, and other noises. They have been there before, but keep going back. I mean under the kitchen sink hasn’t changed for use in years. Bottles, tightly closed of course, a box of sos pads or their equivalent, dust - what is there to see? I am surprised that they do not get on the counters. There is more stuff there. Dishes, silverware, knick-knacks, paddy-wacks, and other stuff. I am still looking at the cheese of course. Hmmmm, maybe a grilled cheese sandwich? It is almost midnight though. Maybe bed woul be better. Nite all

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I imagine that we all have made mistakes when cooking for the first few times. I know that I did. I’ve written about a couple so far. Well, here is another one.

When mom decided to help me learn about cooking we lived in St. Louis, Mo. The St. Louis Post Dispatch had a cooking section where kids could learn how to cook by following recipes. It was mostly fun. I remember one recipe for Mulligan stew. I remember potatoes put on to boil.

I also remember not stirring them. They burned on the bottom and the rest of the potatoes picked up the flavor of the burn. I hadn’t realized this until the complete stew was made. Yuk. To this day I remember to stir what ever I am cooking, and if not stirring, I get it iff the heat or the stove. Burned Mulligan stew is not nice. What an understatement.

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My husband calls the tower on the computer the coffee percolator. Sometimes it does its thing and makes a lot of clicking noises and sounds like it is groaning and moaning. I have no idea what it is doing, but it sounds very busy.

The first time he heard this he asked if I had some water on the stove to boil because he heard the coffee pot percolating away on the stove. He went in there and noticed the stove was off. He came out into the dining room where the computer is set up and announced that the coffee percolator was the computer box. Well, it has been called the percolator ever since then. I guess new names show up every day.

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My grandmother gave me a book that has a lot of recipes in it. She gave it to me more than 25 years ago. The pages have gotten just as borwn as a paper sack, it is still readable however. It has a good recipe for drop biscuits. The name of the book is the Fanny Farmer Boston Cooking School Cook Book. It is filled with hundreds of good ideas. Any way here is the recipe written in a simplified manner.

Drop Biscuits

2 C Self-rising flour / or 2 c. all purpose flour with 3 Tb baking powder + 1tsp salt
1 1/4 c milk
2 Tb oil / I used melted oleo
mix thoroughly together
Drop by spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet.
Bake @ 425′ for 10-15 min.

The biscuits will be fluffy and very tasty. I will blog about this on another blog that I have but will mention the errors that I made when I first used this recipe.

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Thinking on food disasters reminds me of a disaster that happened when I was still a girl and living with mom.

We’d had turkey and she didn’t want to pick the bones to clean off the left over meat. So, she decided that she would make stock from the turkey bones. She put them on to boil and left me in charge. OOPS

Well, I got sleepy and figured that there was a lot of water in the pot and it was on a slow boil, so I could get in a quick nap. Didn’t know that water evaporates quickly when it is going to rain, which it was going to rain that day. When I woke up, the apartment was filled with very stinky smoke half-way down the walls.

Mom and I both opened all of the windows, both the front door and the back door. The smoke started to pour out of the apartment. The stock pot was ruined of course. The turkey bones were charred, the idea of stock, lost. A neighbor cam out and asked if we needed any help. Embarrassing !! I had to admit what happened. The neighbor offered the use of a spare fan to help evacuate the smoke. There was a big drawback to this episode, though. The curtains in the apartment were never the same. No matter how often that mom washed them, they always smelled like burned turkey bones. I never did take a nap when something was on the stove again. Lesson learned the hard way. I thank God that there was never a fire.

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Had some fun this morning. Caught my husband grumbling as he was getting his coffee ready for the first part of the day. What I heard was mutter, mutter, mutter.

He kept walking back and forth muttering to himself. Then I heard the word coffee. I knew he was making it in the kitchen and was wondering what he was grumbling about. Finally I heard him say, ” Make coffee, put it in the thermos, walk around and forget the thermos. Into the living room, back into the kitchen, into the living room, back into the kitchen and still I forgot the coffee.” Then he realized that I was listening to him grumble.

All I could do was grin at him as he finally got the coffee carried from the kitchen into the living room. He gave a grin himself, and the day finally started.

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